Word: amazon
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...which will cost $350 million in its first two years, Sarney angrily denounced what he called the "unjust, defamatory, cruel and indecent" international campaign against Brazil. He defended his government's environmental record and denounced the "alarmist" tone of its ecological critics. He insisted that just 5% of the Amazon has been deforested; the more widely accepted figure...
...will not accept tutelage," the President declared. "We will accept responsibility for the defense of our territory." Sarney reiterated his rejection of so-called debt-for-nature swaps, in which foreign debt is forgiven in exchange for conservation efforts, as just one more way for those who covet the Amazon to meddle in Brazil's affairs...
...vocal environmentalist. "He's trying to - rally public support around a discredited government." Feldman declared the Our Nature program itself "too academic and vague. It won't change a thing." Said another leading ecologist: "It is obvious that the intention of the program is not to save the Amazon but to appease foreign criticism...
...Sarney fell far short of his goal. Just days before Our Nature was announced, a group of 28 Latin American intellectuals, none of them Brazilian, issued a stinging open letter to Sarney accusing him of a "policy of ecocide and ethnocide" in the Amazon. The statement called for an immediate halt to "massive deforestation" and other "acts of barbarism." Among the signers were three prominent novelists: Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez of Colombia, Carlos Fuentes of Mexico and Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru...
...protesting intellectuals particularly criticized the Amazon project that is of most concern to ecologists: a proposed road across the western state of Acre to Pucallpa, Peru, where it would link up with a Peruvian highway that stretches over the Andes to Lima. The highway link would provide Acre with a Pacific outlet for its tropical hardwoods, which are much in demand in Japan. It would also open up the western Amazon for the first time to the kind of commercial exploitation that, in the view of environmentalists, would lead to devastation...